Finally! The gouges all have homes, there's a plan for a couple of drawers, and I've made shavings for the first time in several years! Having to relearn absolutely everything, but trying not to let it get me down. Have lots of green wood to practice on (cherry and maple for now). Pictures!

The two oak drawers on the bottom will go in a frame with drawer slides, and a closed box will go next to the gouges:

Lots of shavings on Sunday, but really need to relearn sharpening (was not that good at it before) to keep things going:

I made these stops to keep the gouges in the right place inside their PVC pipes -- push them into the pipe as far as needed, the non-skid liner keeps 'em in place:

Looks great! You'll want eventually to make sure all t he drawers, boxes, etc., below and near the lathe have doors or are covered otherwise they're destiined to fill with shavings. One guess how I came by that bit of trivia! (grin).

Yep, I already knew that. Hence the plans to build a box with drawers (the oak ones you see there), and another box next to the tool-storage. Probably will just lay a piece of plastic over the PVC pipes with gouges (though it's quite easy to vacuum them out. I just really wanted to "get turning" rather than spend more days and days organizing.

Dennis (and anyone else who has an opinion), here is what the log looks like. It split off from the other two trunks (big-leaf maple), and I'm wondering if that wide area might become a bowl. The black is just dirt, wood underneath seems solid. What would you do with it? (the upper part will be firewood).

That looks to be pretty big for the size of your lathe unless you do some trimming and shaping into somewhat round to start with. The first thing I'd do is cut it into lengths approximately as long as the diameter, then rip it into halves to remove the pith. The if you have time, rough turn the bowls, if that's your goal, to at least 1" thick. (there's a percentage of wall thickness determined by the final thickness you want to aim for but I forget what that is (grin)). Or if you don't have time to rough turn everything then once the blanks have been ripped from the log lengths, coat the ends with a good end grain sealer to slow the drying in order to help prevent serious checking. But if you can, rough turning will yield the least checking.

Now as to which way to mount the blanks for grain exposure, it depends on what kind of grain pattern you want to end up with. Turning from the 'inside out' will yield one pattern, from the 'outside in' somewhat the opposite. It's too bad you couldn't have attended our meeting last month as we had Bruce Campbel from the Vancouver club give a great presentation on just this very subject. I'll try to put together a diagram to explain it if you like. The best option I think would be to prep the logs by ripping them in half lengthwise then take some smaller stuff from the wood stove wood pile and experiment with turning from both directions.

Not exactly much in the way of advice but there are proberly some others here that can do a better job of describing the grain thing.

Oh, if you want to do natural edge stuff then you have to work from the outside in.

Thanks, Dennis, everything to the left of that wide area is stuff I'll use for spindle turning, it's too shallow for bowl work of any kind methinks, and I can make wine-stoppers out of it (or just practice sticks ). The part that hit me as a bowl candidate is the wide-spot-in-the-road section. I might just coat it in Anchorseal and set it aside for a few weeks. The two bigger chunks in the "Got Maple?" picture are candidates for what you suggest about getting some bowl blanks and playing with grain and such. Thanks!

Platters and such are great projects, too, but in my view they should have "feet" rather than sit on a single base. Reason? They're bound to warp and move back & forth to where they don't sit on the table without rocking a bit.

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